Building Open Specs
(for the web)
David Recordon November 5, 2008
ApacheCon US New Orleans

Open Source
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jagelado/16631508/

http://www.illustratorworld.com/artwork/2238/

“Open Data is increasingly
important as services
move online.”
—Tim O'Reilly (OSCON '07)

realtime data inside!
\"It's like flying on an iPhone!\"
http://flickr.com/photos/sathishcj/1868113345/

http://flickr.com/photos/
mag3737/1914076277/

Social Application
• Each with a few great features
(UNIX philosophy)
• Creating combined value
• Building blocks for new value
http://www.slideshare.net/stoweboyd/building-social-applications

http://flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/2545757754/

http://adactio.com/journal/1357

My 20+ Social Networks

Interoperable Platforms

Joseph Smarr (Plaxo)

The “Open Stack” (for the social web)
Identity & Profile ! OpenID + hcard
Discovery ! XRDS-Simple
Authorization ! OAuth
Relationships & Contacts ! PoCo + XFN
Activities ! ATOM + ??
Gadgets ! OpenSocial

They Are Quite Similar...
• Communities ranging from individuals to companies
• Occurring outside of formal standards bodies
• Open Source implementations in many languages
• Major adoption at an increasing pace
• Open specifications designed to be freely implementable

Standards Bodies

And share problems...

Licensing (IPR)

Foundations

“Best Practices”

Community

...but Open Source solved this

opensource
TM
initiative

The Open Web
Foundation

Licensing (freely implementable by anyone)
Copyright (ideally Creative Commons for each spec)
Community (to support the Open Web)
Incubation (creating new open specifications for the web)

Licensing (freely implementable by anyone)
Copyright (ideally Creative Commons for each spec)
Community (to support the Open Web)
Incubation (creating new open specifications for the web)

Licensing (freely implementable by anyone)
Copyright (ideally Creative Commons for each spec)
Community (to support the Open Web)
Incubation (creating new open specifications for the web)

Licensing (freely implementable by anyone)
Copyright (ideally Creative Commons for each spec)
Community (to support the Open Web)
Incubation (creating new open specifications for the web)

Licensing (freely implementable by anyone)
Copyright (ideally Creative Commons for each spec)
Community (to support the Open Web)
Incubation (creating new open specifications for the web)

Two Stages

1) License

2) Incubator

http://OpenWebFoundation.org/

http://groups.google.com/group/open-web-discuss

Questions?
david@sixapart.com